"So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth." (Rev. 3:16) “To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact” (Charles Darwin)

Back to the cat fights

Sadly, it’s back to the observations of the foibles and idiosyncrasies of the Climate Elect, folk such as William Connolley, Eli Rabett and others who strain at gnats while swallowing camels.

They have become obsessed with the funding of one Willie Soon, a scientist who has labored for years trying to show a clear correlation (and more than that, causation) between solar changes and climate changes. While I think he’s well off the mark, if he finds funding to pursue his line of research, best of luck to him.

But coincidentally, while Rabett and Connolley were writing multiple posts (joined in their outrage by the Guardian and other bastions of the Climate Consensus) about the fact that Soon got funding from fossil fuel sources, another story was also in the news that they seem to have overlooked. In fact, one might wonder if they are deliberately focusing on the Soon story to paper over the other. Nah, that would never happen.

There are 187,000 links to the Google News search results for ‘Pachauri sexual harassment.’ One wonders what Rabett and Connnolley are reading?

Controversy over Willie Soon is not recent. The Climaterati have been witchhunting him for more than a decade. Over at Bishop Hill, the redoubtable Steve McIntyre comments,”As with Mann and Gavin Schmidt, you have to watch the pea with Russell Seitz.

Seitz writes: “12 other leading climate scientists wrote a blistering critique of Soon and Baliunas’ paper in Eos, the American Geophysical Union weekly condemning Soon & Co/s use of precipitation records to reconstruct past temperatures , a proxy they declared “fundamentally unsound.” in testimony before Congress.”

In fact, it was Mann – not Soon – who actually used “precipitation records” to reconstruct past temperatures. By yelling loudly, Mann and Seitz have tricked the public on this issue. In addition to precipitation proxies, Mann used actual instrumental precipitation records to reconstruct past temperature. Oddly, Mann’s geographic locations of his instrumental precipitation records were nearly all incorrect. Thus the rain supposedly located in Maine used the precipitation history from Paris, France. The precipitation record attributed to the Madras, India gridcell appears to come from Philadelphia.

Unlike Mann, Soon did not use precipitation to “reconstruct past temperature”, Soon examined precipitation proxies to see whether the 20th century levels were extreme (hockey stick shaped), concluding that they weren’t. Many of the proxies considered in Soon et al were later incorporated into proxy networks of Graham et al 2010, Seager et al 2007. The earliest draft of AR5, citing such studies, stated, using terminology reminiscent of Soon:

overall, multiple studies suggest that current drought and flood regimes are not unusual within the context of the last 1000 years

One of the single most despicable exchanges in Climategate in my opinion was Tom Wigley writing to Mann in the lead-up to the EOS 2003 article:

Mike, Well put! By chance SB03 may have got some of these precip things right, but we don’t want to give them any way to claim credit.

Wigley and Mann succeeded in that effort. Abetted by people Russell Seitz. The persecution of WIllie Soon by the academic community has been shameful.

There are further details on this persecution in the CG3 dossier that have not yet been publicized.”

9 responses to “Back to the cat fights”

Soon received money from the fossil fuel industry and it’s all over the news. Richard Muller, an alarmist, received far more than that from the Koch brothers (supposed funders of denialism) and everyone ignores it. It doesn’t fit into their narrative.

As we go from a weak solar cycle to few or no sun spots and as it gets much, much colder and the new Maunder Minimum which a number of solar scientists like my own father, Dr, Aden Meinel, predicted, the global warming scam will die…rather…freeze to death.

It is already unusually and bitterly cold in key parts of the planet one of which is where I live in Northeast North America.

The climate believers still buy the prediction that AGW means more snow and more cold weather. One cool trick of the climate hypesters was to put out enough opposing predictions- more cold, less cold, more snow, no snow, more rain, less rain etc., that the believers can point to any weather event and claim (most of them sincerely) that the event is as predicted.